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Monday, December 19, 2005

… at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space.

Charles A. Lindbergh, 'The Spirit of St. Louis,' 1953

Somehow we have allowed the culture to tell us that the physical world is all that really matters. Science reinforces the assumption that what we can see and touch is the only part of life that is real, or that we can really know. We go along with it – separating the spiritual from the “real world.” But that’s not how it’s meant to be. The Christian worldview recognizes that the most important part of our humanity is the part that no one can see or touch – or completely explain. A holistic view of the universe honors both the seen and the unseen as having laws inherent to its proper operation. And that’s what this blog will be about.

Flying is a metaphor for that kind of worldview and that kind of life. There is something about flying that makes everything else you do seem different – a perspective thing that puts the mundane peculiarities of this life on earth back where they belong – under the clouds. But just because they’re under the clouds does not mean they go away. We can’t dwell only in the “factual and hard.” But we can’t stay up in the “solitude of interstellar space” forever either. We were made of, and for, both. Knowing that will change your life. Living that will change the world.

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C. S. Lewis -- Perelandra

...[the eldil] was simply a very faint rod or pillar of light … [that was] not at right angles to the floor. But as soon as I have said this, I hasten to add that this way of putting it is a later reconstruction. What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical but the floor was not horizontal – the whole room seemed to have heeled over as if it were on board ship. The impression, however produced, was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal.